Pedro Moore's List: Gaming Research

• In Brazil, gamers are expected to spend $2 billion on games in 2011.
• Online and mobile gaming accounts for 68 percent of time spent gaming and 51 percent of spending.
• By comparison, spending on games in Mexico will reach $1.2 billion in 2011,
• Mobile and online games account for about 60 percent of the time and 31 percent of the money spent on gaming.
• In Russia, gamers will spend $1.5 billion on games in 2011.
• Casual, social and mobile account for 48 percent of the time spent gaming.

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• Bushnell, the founder of Atari, talked about the game industry’s hilarious history and his own mistakes, like failing to invest in Apple when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak offered a third of the company to him for $50,000. Bushnell said he plans to disrupt early education through his new startup, Speed to Learn, which mixes lessons with game mechanics. His Wordplay.com site can teach Spanish five or six times faster than the leading language software, Rosetta Stone, Bushnell claimed. He foresaw a “golden age of creativity” coming with the falling costs of making games for mobile devices. But he urged entrepreneurs to “mistrust consensus.” Social networks are “overdone” now, he says.
• Chang  said that mobile gaming is a good place for developers to start, rather than social, since Zynga dominates Facebook.
• Chang said one successful strategy for game startups has been to be a fast copycat, as Zynga was described in its early days.
• Those companies can snare lots of users quickly and then become distribution powerhouses. Over time, they can improve their original games, but in the meantime they can wind the land rush.
• Digital Chocolate
• Merel said he expects acquisitions to continue, particularly as Chinese and other Asian companies acquire Western companies (going in the other direction often is harder because of tougher regulations on foreign ownership).
• But there’s a limit to how much expansion is possible, since many Chinese games just don’t sell that well in Western markets.
• Goldberg said his informal survey showed that the most popular way to get a game discovered is by having it featured by the platform owner, such as Apple. The second-biggest way was incentivized installs, which were banned as too manipulative by Apple. The third was word of mouth marketing, the fourth was free apps such as FreeAppADay.com; and the last was social networking.
• mphasis on sharing, badge rewards, and scores. Games that allow users to express themselves will also be shared more and spread in a more viral way.
• The best way to spread a mobile game now is to take your phone and show a game to your friend — word of mouth
• The good thing is mobile users try out a lot of games. The bad thing is attention spans are short.

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• Key social game markets Brazil, Germany, Russia and Turkey are seeing huge growth in non-Facebook social gaming traffic. Developers who target those markets can see good distribution, strong monetization, and lower costs for acquiring new customers.
• Asia will account for about $2 billion total revenue for 2011, but South America and Western and Eastern Europe are growing at very fast rates. Russia has 35 million users of social games and Brazil has 32.6 million. Germany is generating the most social gaming revenue in Europe with more than $173 million in expected revenue this year. That is expected to reach $250 million by 2014.

• Badges can and should be more complex than the simplistic digital image files I have on my blog. When a badge is created with HTML code, for example, complex information can be embedded within it, allowing for a badge issuer to manage many badge characteristics including how long it is valid, if it links back to a particular site, etc. I l-o-v-e that vision!
• As more formal and organized structures begin to be created around the how badges are issued and used, they will transform and become more meaningful symbols of talent to employers and also validate one’s skills, hobbies, passions, and life experiences in informal social circles. 
• Ten years from now, could a collection of badges mean more to an employer than a college degree?
• Three years from now, could we be searching Google with visual icons to connect us with users who share our badge profiles?
• If a patient was preparing for brain surgery, for example, could he enter the visual icon used to represent a “brain surgery survivor” into a Google search box and find a community of support?

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• • Latest rumour: Zynga making $100 million in revenue
  
  
  • Ten reasons microtransactions are better than subscriptions
  
  
  • Zynga making $50 million in revenue from virtual goods

• “Learning environments such as Echoes may allow some children to exceed their potential, behaving and achieving in ways that even teachers who knew them well could not have anticipated.”
• “The beauty for it is that there are no real-world consequences, so children can afford to experiment with different social scenarios without real-world risks,” she said.